And of course, Cancun Cruz took to the Twitterverse, hyping the same bogus narrative.

If I thought that fmr Pres Trump had an ability to plan, I'd say that he intentionally set up Pres Biden to fail in the withdrawal.

And had Trump won in 2020, he would have finished the withdrawal exactly how he negotiated the deal with the Taliban, even more recklessly because he would have made the military do it sooner (the agreement was for complete pullout by May 2021).

And when the fubar eventually happened, Trump would have laid full blame on the generals - just like he did with the first military action he took after becoming President which cost the life of a Navy Seal.

They can sue all they want, but FERPA is federal...

Dallas Humber, 34, of Elk Grove, California, and Matthew Allison, 37, of Boise, Idaho, each face 15 criminal counts, including soliciting hate crimes and providing material support to terrorism. The two were in custody, officials said; it was not immediately clear if they had lawyers.

The group's targets also included U.S. government officials and critical infrastructure sites, with an overall goal of causing societal collapse in the United States, U.S. Justice Department officials said during an online news conference.

"The federal government is adapting and evolving its strategy to confront hate," said Kristen Clarke, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. "Whether carried out on our streets or perpetrated by way of online platforms, we will follow the facts where they lead and use every tool available to hold perpetrators of hate accountable."

Humber and Allison helped create and promote a document that sought to justify the group's ideology and included detailed instructions on carrying out terror attacks, including how to build bombs, according to the indictment.

The Opinion video above takes viewers to Tennessee, the Volunteer State, the capital of country music and the birthplace of Davy Crockett and the MoonPie - and a national leader in voter disenfranchisement.

The state has come about that last claim to fame through its handling of voting access for people convicted of felonies.

The effects are particularly acute among the Black population, with an astonishing 21 percent of Black adults barred from voting - the highest rate in the country.

Among them is Sarah Bynum, a community advocate convicted of a felony 30 years ago who has struggled to restore her voting rights and is featured in the video above. "Makes me feel like I'm a foreigner in my own country," she laments.

"But voter fraud" .... that doesn't really exist in numbers to sway any election in America. Our priorities are backwards, just like the GOP wants them to be.

The money was good: One participant made more than $20,000 for several weeks of boosting assigned messages, according to the Zelle receipts.

The influencers' marching orders were clear: make a series of lurid sexual jibes aimed at Harris, the least crude of which was comparing her to Haliey Welch, the "Hawk Tuah girl" who became a viral sensation over a video of her discussing oral sex.

Perhaps RCade can revisit the archives and find out if his blog is being used by paid agitators yet again using illicit means to smear Kamala Harris and boost support for Donald Trump.

And I have a pretty good idea who these posters were without taking the time to go back and look, and not a single Retort veteran would be surprised.

[The other Republican presidential candidates] were "puppets," "not strong people." He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.

"They might speak badly about me now, but they won't later," Trump said. They like to say they are "public servants," he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would "evolve," as they say in politics. "It will be very easy; I can make them evolve," Trump told me. "They will evolve."

Like most people who'd been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.

If there's been one recurring lesson of the Trump-era GOP, it's this: Never underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and - perhaps most of all - a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers ("weak like a baby").

Everyone: I composed this thread's title myself. The article's title is something completely different. I felt the tale of the article was that the father was at fault, but learning about his life and relationship with his son, I sensed no malicious neglect or indifference on what he was trying to do to reach his son.

But that doesn't absolve him from full responsibility. And I'd say the same had it been me and my own son. My point was to note the entire situation was much more complicated that one of just unquestioned neglect in securing his firearms. Colin was trying to love his imperfect son from his own imperfect life and imperfect decisions.

#3 Tonyroma The father should be held responsible.

Did you miss my unqualified statement?

Let me be clear: Colin Gray deserves to be held responsible for his role in allowing his son access to a weapon he took to school and killed and injured innocent children and teachers who'd never done Colt any harm.

It's amazing we all have the ability to focus on what we want and miss what else is clearly there. No criticism, because I often do that myself here.

Methinks you have the intellect of an amoeba with diarrhea.

There is no difference in meaning: Vance thinks that the killing of school children is a fact of life.

The preface only establishes his dislike of a "fact" that isn't a fact. It's only a fact to those unwilling to do something to change the current status quo.

Hardening schools won't eliminate shootings, stopping deranged people from accessing the weaponry used in school shootings will stop school shootings.

This quote has been taken out of context.

No it wasn't you ignorant ass. Even the abbreviated quote says the same thing. There is zero difference in meaning.

"I don't like this. I don't like to admit this. I don't like that this is a fact of life."

To me, the actual full quote is worse, because it reveals Vance admitting 1) He doesn't like to "admit" his truth on the subject; 1) He doesn't like that "this (school shootings resulting in the murder of innocent children and teachers) is a fact of life."

It's NOT a fact of life, it's wholly preventable if we want to! There are myriad ways where law-abiding Americans can have weapons while we stop them from being used to slaughter our children. Only a coward and a fool says "I don't like to admit the indiscriminate killing of our children by weapons designed for warfare is a fact of life."

Vance is just another scared coward unwilling to join rightly concerned citizens to amend our 2nd Amendment to better protect non-carrying Americans if we can't find a way to stop these shootings within its language somehow.

I don't think there's been enough discussion about Trump's lies.

#8 cont.

And because the buyer doesn't open the card package at the point of purchase, they don't realize they've been scammed until the physical card is removed from the packaging, and someone attempts to use it or check its account balance.

The store where the card was purchased isn't going to refund the money because to them, the money was electronically passed through to whoever holds the real card. The purchaser is left simply SOL.

#6

If I read this correctly here's how the scam works.

A person goes to buy a sealed gift card package where the card's activation number/barcode is duplicated on the outside of the package while the physical card remains hidden inside.

When the purchaser goes to the register and places money on the card's account, they're actually putting their money on the card the scammer's possess because inside the sealed card package is another card - often from a different vendor - that doesn't have the numbers the buyer placed his money towards.

#104, #105

Weak arguments, even weaker minds.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It seems to me that you identify with Colin Gray,

I don't think that I 'identify' with Colin as much as it was the facts and details of his life are so familiar with thousands of fathers like him. I've never owned a gun, never encouraged my son to partake in any firearms related activities, so in the sense of the weapons at issue here, I couldn't be more different because I both respect and understand the double-edged nature of firearms to both protect and project lethality as a matter of their purpose.

This morning, there's stories about the mother having contacted the school to warn them about her son. Obviously, there are complications I have no idea about. But I guess my initial response to reading excerpts from the police report indicated to me a single father ironworker trying to raise his troubled son while dealing with all the other things swirling in and around their lives. I saw in these two, a common theme of modern life where parents have pressures upon them that my parent's generation simply didn't in the scale we see today.

And I wonder, what programs or specialists might have been able to provide a better path for Colt had he been willing or able to seek guidance and counseling. But it's equally possible that he rejected the help being offered to him.

But at the end of the day, people that shouldn't be, are dead and some injured. None of them deserved their fates. And that's where we are at this moment, with the future ready to extract punishment and retribution through our courts and laws. But we know it's going to happen again and again if we don't change the ways we deal with the conflict that proliferation of firearms causes due to their constitutional protections.

Maybe the answer with AR-styled weapons could be some kind of law regulating their non-use and storage - nothing affecting their non-criminal active use at all. Perhaps such a law might demand that when not in use all of these weapons must either have trigger locks attached or be kept in locked gun safes or other lockable devices. Maybe even making it against federal law to sell or transfer any firearm that doesn't come with a working trigger lock at the point of sale. The trigger lock manufacturers would certainly be happy, and just maybe we could put a meaningful impediment between teenagers and weapons capable of shooting many people in very short periods of time.

#13

Jun 25, 2018

Oooooh, how currently relevant.

I am truly not one who's disinterested in the heartbreaking tragedy of school shootings, especially when we know what keeps them from happening in nearly every other civilized nation on this planet. When we hear a child had access to a weapon originally designed for warfare, it simply makes no sense, and we immediately blame the parent(s) for allowing it to happen.

I wanted to hate Colin Gray, but after only reading a couple paragraphs I came to an unmistakable conclusion: Except for the fact this father didn't make a habit of locking down all his weapons as a matter of practice - especially since his son showed obvious troubling signs - Colin was just a single dad trying to deal with a son challenged by mental health issues. Or in other words, a simple father dealing with all the cards life has dealt him in the best way he knows how.

At least by this rendering, this dad wasn't encouraging his son to be violent with their sharing of hunting, he was trying to connect with his son's self esteem, trying to make him more secure when confronting his fears and the bullying he's said to have been haunted by.

Let me be clear: Colin Gray deserves to be held responsible for his role in allowing his son access to a weapon he took to school and killed and injured innocent children and teachers who'd never done Colt any harm.

Having said that, I can still see myself in his shoes playing the cards I was dealt, and honestly - knowing how much you want to love and encourage your child when they have mental health struggles - there but for the grace of God,... under similar circumstances, it could have been my child.

Middle school had also been rough for Colt Gray. He had just finished the seventh grade when Miller interviewed the father and son.

Colin Gray said the boy had just a few friends and frequently got picked on. Some students "just ridiculed him day after day after day."

"I don't want him to fight anybody, but they just keep like pinching him and touching him," Gray said. "Words are one thing, but you start touching him and that's a whole different deal. And it's just escalated to the point where like his finals were last week and that was the last thing on his mind."

A year before they would both end up charged in the high school shooting, Colin Gray insisted to the sheriff's investigator that his son wasn't the type to threaten violence.

"He's not a loner, Officer Miller. Don't get that," the father said, adding: "He just wants to go to school, do his own thing and he doesn't want any trouble."

Now both Colt, 14, and Colin Gray, 54, are charged in the killings of two students and two teachers Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta. Nine others were hurt, seven of them shot. The teen is charged with murder, and his father is accused of second-degree murder for providing his son with a semiautomatic, AR 15-style rifle used to kill children. Arrest warrants say the elder Gray did so knowing his son "was a threat to himself and others."

Jackson County authorities ended their inquiry into Colt Gray a year ago, concluding that there wasn't clear evidence to link him to a threat posted on Discord, a social media site popular with video gamers. The records from that investigation provide at least a narrow glimpse into a boy who struggled with his parents' breakup and at the middle school he attended at the time, where his father said others frequently taunted him.

"He gets flustered and under pressure. He doesn't really think straight," Colin Gray told the investigator on May 21, 2023, recalling a discussion he'd had with the boy's principal.

Shooting guns and hunting, he said, were frequent pastimes for father and son. Gray said he was encouraging the boy to be more active outdoors and spend less time playing video games on his Xbox.

When Colt Gray killed a deer months earlier, his father swelled with pride. He showed the investigator a photo on his cellphone, saying: "You see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer."

"It was just the greatest day ever," Colin Gray said.

An eviction upended the Grays' family in summer 2022. On July 25 of that year, a sheriff's deputy was dispatched to the rental home on a suburban cul-de-sac where Colin Gray, his wife, Colt and the boy's two younger siblings lived. It was following the eviction, he said, that his wife left him, taking the two younger siblings with her.

Colt Gray "struggled at first with the separation and all," said the father, who worked a construction job.

"I'm the sole provider, doing high rises downtown," he told the investigator. Two days later, there was a follow-up interview with Colin Gray while he was at work. He said by phone: "I'm hanging off the top of a building. ... I've got a big crane lift going, so it's kind of noisy up here."

#1

You mean where the propaganda can't be challenged, or we can have a "conversation" FFS.

Again, a complete lack of understanding on how American elections work. The opponent is the adversary, not the press. The opponent makes substantive critiques of the other sides issue and policy positions. The media's job is to report it, not inject themselves into the process for the sake of its own business model.

Printed pieces aren't government edicts that voters are bound to like in authoritarian countries your thought process is more familiar with. Every person has multiple choices when receiving something in the mail from a politician: 1) Read it, and consider what it says as it pertains to the individual's electoral decision; 2) Throw it in the trash/ignore the information; 3) Use the information given and then do independent research on BOTH candidate's positions and policies; 4) Do something not mention in 1-3.

And every voter is free to have "conversations" with whomever they want to, no one needs the media to moderate these conversations for them.

In America, both voters and candidates have the freedom to run and vote however they want. The media can either assist or hinder any particular candidate, and how they choose to deal with the media is their choice alone. Again, if voters think that NOT taking precious time away from speaking to actual voters and sitting down with media members is a dealbreaker, then that's up to them, not the media, to decide. The media's in it for money, not patriotism. Don't conflate the two.